Julia Harris

I received my undergraduate degree in Physiology and Experimental Psychology (PPP, 1st Class) from Oxford University, and then joined the 4-Year Wellcome PhD Programme in Neuroscience at University College London, where I worked in David Attwell’s lab on brain energetics. In 2014, I received a Junior Research Fellowship to work between Imperial and the Francis Crick Institute. I am interested in how the brain has evolved to be computationally efficient, in terms of how neural circuits and individual synapses balance the trade-off between high-fidelity information processing and low energetic cost. I am particularly interested in whether sleep plays a role in rebalancing this trade-off on a daily basis, to allow the consolidation of new memories whilst keeping the total energetic cost of neural computation low. To investigate these topics, I use a combination of in vitro and in vivo techniques, including electrophysiology, optogenetics, and calcium imaging, as well as metabolic and behavioural paradigms and computational modelling.